As much as I love playing in the snow, it just hasn't been as fun without a vehicle to take out in it. I'm ready for spring to be here, mostly so I can start hiking again. I've actually been hiking each of the past two weekends, but the snow kept me from hiking as far as I'd have liked. The first hike was behind Kenilworth, sometimes through two feet of snow, and the second one was out by Pinnacle Peak, looking for a geocache. I'm surprised that I managed to find the cache--it was described as being in a 5-gallon bucket, so I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to find, even with 8" of snow on the ground. I didn't count on it being buried, and I only found it by chance just before I was about to give up looking. Luckily, it was under a large flat rock, which made just a big enough bulge in the snow for me to want to dig around it a little bit.

Anyhow, I'm really getting stoked for warmer weather because of these two caches, which are on top of this formation in the San Rafael Reef. The hike will actually begin on this side of the Reef, and as you can see in the right side of that picture, it's quite a steady incline all the way to the top. It's over 2 miles from the rest area on I-70 (where those pictures were taken from) to the top of the Reef, and about a 1500-foot gain in elevation--not too bad as long as it's not the dead of summer. According to last year's weather history, the temperature didn't start getting favorable for long hikes until the beginning of March, so it may be two months until I can actually go on this hike. I'm trying to get in shape in order to do a lot more hiking this year, since I plan on doing as many county high peaks as I can, including King's Peak late in the summer (if I don't whimp out, anyway).